Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Gross Vows He’d Return To Cuba From Furlough

Alan Gross pledged to return to Cuba should the government release him to visit his ailing mother.

“I would return to Cuba,” Gross told CNN in a home interview last Friday. “You know, you – you can quote me on that. I’m saying it live. I would return to Cuba if they let me visit my mother before she dies. And we’ve gotten no response, no response whatsoever.”

He dismissed a reported Cuban offer to fly his mother, who lives in Texas, to Cuba as “baloney,” noting that she is too ill to travel.

His mother, 90, is suffering from inoperable cancer; his daughter also has undergone cancer treatment since his arrest.

Gross was arrested in 2009 and sentenced last year to 15 years on charges related to his distribution of communications equipment to the island’s small Jewish community, working as a contractor for the U.S. Agency on International Development.

He has appealed for humanitarian leave of two weeks, and his family has noted that a U.S. judge allowed Raul Gonzalez, on parole after serving time for espionage, to return to Cuba for a short period to visit his dying brother.

Gross said the items he was bringing to the Cuban Jewish community, in a bid to enhance their connections with others in the Jewish world, were unremarkable.

“My understanding was if there was any problem with – with the things that I was bringing here – which, by the way, anyone could buy in any Best Buy or Radio Shack or on Amazon.com – that if there was any problem at the airport that I would just leave the equipment at the airport and take it back with me when I left,” he said.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.